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I Have Seen The Future Of Media, And It’s In China

Chinese companies have an image problem in the West. We think they are copycats. But they innovate in their own way and there is so much to learn.

In order to get an authentic customer experience, I installed the messaging app WeChat on my phone last week. It’s big in China. How big? 570-million-users-per-day-big. The most interesting feature to me are ‘public accounts’ from companies and also media. They are embedded in the messaging experience. Updates from these public accounts appear right below the message from your mom. Right where the eyeballs are. This is better than the Quartz app that chats with you, but Quartz does not work outside the app itself. Integration into the place where the eyeballs are will definetely be part of the future of media.

In this article lots of insights into how innovative China is and what we can learn. Consider what the Chinese travel company C-trip did. They launched a “virtual tour manager” program on WeChat, where it creates WeChat messaging groups for individual travelers heading to the same city around the same time. Each of these groups are administered by a human tour guide who helps book restaurants, looks up travel routes and sends alerts in case of emergencies.Part of the future of media will be connecting audiences to each other.

Nice (high level) report by Adobe with six customer experience strategies. Also an interesting challenge in media, where journalists rightfully cherish their total independence: unite the promise makers (marketers) with the promise keepers (rest of the organisation).

I totally agree with Buzzfeed´s Dao Nguyen that you need to ’re-anchor’ periodically. That means questioning whether what you’ve historically done, is still relevant today. It is hard if you are in a good company , because the way you’ve done things is how you became good in the first place. But in order to become great, this is what you should do. Re-anchor periodically.Dao is hiring data scientists and analysts by the way.

Insightful report by Reuters on how newsrooms can implement data to optimise their workflows. Includes best pratices from the Guardian, the Financial Times, BBC and The Huffington Post. Direct link to the report.

The ad blocking conversation is here and you cannot opt out. Let´s start with dependency. It may be better to be as independent of ads as possbile. Interesting to note that beforementioned WeChat relies mostly on transactions and just 5% is advertising, where Facebook relies for 95% on ads that can be blocked.

Mobile Operator Three takes it up a step and implements network-wide adblocking that eliminates all mobile advertising for its 9 million UK customers. “We don’t believe customers should have to pay for data usage driven by mobile ads.” Controversial.

New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said he is considering banning ad-blocking readers who are not subscribers. He sees whitelisting ad blockers as ´extortion´ and ad blocking as stealing a print copy from a newsstand.

Interesting overview of ad blocking history in this New York Times piece. Great suggestion: look at what happened back in the 1990s when spam was the scourge of consumers. The fix came only when we started compiling lists of bad actors, based on what consumers marked as spam.